Representative lines: "Now that the future is unfolding all the time you are away. It will readily absorb the light. If the wavelength is slightly changed, then the atoms, then the light. It's the one falling in who sees the clock" ("The Book of Imaginary Planets" 3).

Working questions: What does a "quantum poetics" look like? If we assume we live in a multiverse rather than a universe, how, then, do we think about human experience—love, confusion, mortality—in light of that overwhelming fact? (Note that a book of poems is made up of many verses, a universe just one.) Poems with titles like "Notes on the Enclosure of Spheres" and "Clinamen Principium" think about the physics of celestial bodies and the physics of self through swift, elastic images. "The Barbelith Poems" invoke Grant Morrison's Invisibles.

Lavishly illustrated with over 100 color photographs, Places of Faith takes readers on a fascinating religious road trip. Christopher Scheitle and Roger Finke have crisscrossed America, visiting churches in small towns and rural areas, as well as the mega-churches, storefronts, synagogues, Islamic centers, Eastern temples, and other places of faith in major cities. Each stop on their tour provides an opportunity to introduce a particular current of American religion. Memphis serves as a window into the Black Church, a visit to Colorado Springs provides insight into evangelicalism, and a stop in Detroit sheds light on American Muslims. Readers visit Hare Krishnas in San Francisco, the Amish in central Pennsylvania, and a "cowboy church" in Amarillo, Texas. As the authors journey across the country, they retell unique religious histories and touch on local religious profiles and trends. They draw from conversations they had with pastors, imams, bishops, priests, and monks, along with ordinary believers of all kinds. Most of all, they tell the reader what they saw and heard, putting a human face on America's astounding religious diversity.

Larry McMurtry’s Comanche Moon. I grew up watching John Ford Westerns, dubbed into German that is, which seems a little strange now, but felt entirely natural then. John Wayne was much revered in my house: to my parents who had fled communist Czechoslovakia his characters’ gruff non-conformism must have symbolized something, a mode of life and Weltanschauung denoted in our house by a puzzling one-word cipher: západ -- the occident, the west.

Larry McMurtry’s west is a different beast from Ford’s. Here, too, are the endless skies of Texas, the same yearning for the open prairie. But where Ford’s cowboys and pistoleros remain, at bottom, inscrutable, McMurtry...[read on]

Political paranoia, dangerous liaisons, and defiant compassion mark Dan Vyleta's unforgettable journey into a cityscape of totalitarian dread and deception.

Vienna, 1939. Professor Speckstein's dog has been brutally killed, the latest victim in a string of unsolved murders. Speckstein wants answers-but these are uncharitable times, and one must be careful where one probes…

When an unexpected house call leads Dr. Beer to Speckstein's apartment, he finds himself in the bedroom of Zuzka, the professor's niece. Wide-eyed, flirtatious, and not detectably ill, Zuzka leads the young doctor to her window and opens up a view of their apartment block that Beer has never known. Across the shared courtyard, there is nine-year-old Anneliese, the lonely daughter of an alcoholic. Five windows to the left lives a secretive mime who comes home late at night and keeps something-or someone-precious hidden from view. From the garret drifts the mournful sound of a trumpet player, and a basement door swings closed behind the building's inscrutable janitor.

Does one of these enigmatic neighbors have blood on their hands?

Dr. Beer, who has his own reasons for keeping his private life hidden from public scrutiny, reluctantly becomes embroiled in an inquiry that forces him to face the dark realities of Nazi rule. By turns chilling and tender, The Quiet Twin explores a dystopian world of social paranoia, mistrust, and fear-and the danger of staying silent.

The author of the charmingly comprehensive A Short History of Everything here focuses on the objects that fill his own home, giving readers a tour of the place and sharing a small piece of compelling information about every item he comes across. For Bryson, our homes are autobiographies we write every day, journals we keep by acquiring, enduring, and loving. After reading this, no old house will ever seem ordinary; At Home shows how our dwellings are links of commonality that connect us to one another. Mi casa es su casa.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Nicole-Marie Handy has loved all things French since she was a child. After the death of her best friend, determined to get out of her rut, she goes to Paris, leaving behind a marriage proposal. While there, Nicole chances upon an old photo of her father-lovingly inscribed, in his hand, to a woman Nicole has never heard of. What starts as a vacation quickly becomes an investigation into his relationship to this mystery woman.

Moving back and forth in time between the sparkling Paris of today and the jazz-fueled city filled with expatriates in the 1950s, Passing Love is the story of two women dealing with lost love, secrets, and betrayal...and how the City of Light may hold all of the answers.

The 1920s saw one of the most striking revolutions in manners and morals to have marked North American society, affecting almost every aspect of life, from dress and drink to sex and salvation. Protestant Christianity was being torn apart by a heated controversy between traditionalists and the modernists, as they sought to determine how much their beliefs and practices should be altered by scientific study and more secular attitudes. Out of the controversy arose the Fundamentalist movement, which has become a powerful force in twentieth-century America.

During this decade, hundreds (and perhaps thousands) of young girl preachers, some not even school age, joined the conservative Christian cause, proclaiming traditional values and condemning modern experiments with the new morality. Some of the girls drew crowds into the thousands. But the stage these girls gained went far beyond the revivalist platform. The girl evangelist phenomenon was recognized in the wider society as well, and the contrast to the flapper worked well for the press and the public. Girl evangelists stood out as the counter-type of the flapper, who had come to define the modern girl. The striking contrast these girls offered to the racy flapper and to modern culture generally made girl evangelists a convenient and effective tool for conservative and revivalist Christianity, a tool which was used by their adherents in the clash of cultures that marked the 1920s.

Bear Down, Bear North, by Melinda Moustakis, a collection of short stories all set in Alaska, full of the things you would expect as such: salmon fisherman, rifles, moose in the back yard, kids running wild, too much alcohol and not enough good sense. The quality of the writing here is the real draw, however you feel about Alaska (I happen to love it). Melinda is deeply in love with the place and with language, and her voice will get inside your head and stay there in all the best ways....[read on]

Heart-stopping prose and crackling observations on a spiritual journey toward a life rich in love and freedom.

Stuck in a dead-end relationship, this fearless narrator leaves her metaphorical baggage behind and finds a comfort zone in the air, “feeling safest with one plane ticket in her hand and another in her underwear drawer.” She flies around the world, finding reasons to love life in dozens of far-flung places from Alaska to Bhutan. Along the way she weathers unplanned losses of altitude, air pressure, and landing gear. With the help of a squad of loyal, funny, wise friends and massage therapists, she learns to sort truth from self-deception, self-involvement from self-possession.

At last, having found a new partner “who loves Don DeLillo and the NHL” and a daughter “who needs you to teach her to dive and to laugh at herself”—not to mention two dogs and two horses—“staying home becomes more of an option. Maybe.”

Kathryn Erskine was a lawyer for fifteen years before turning to her first love: writing.

Her debut novel, Quaking, was one of YALSA’s Top Ten Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers. She is the author of Mockingbird, winner of the 2010 American National Book Award for Young People's Literature.

What could be more fascinating than a story narrated by Death himself? Set in one of the most gruesome of human arenas, the Holocaust? In a real tour de force, Zusak has created empathy for our ultimate enemy, death. As cold as Death tries to be, there's a crack in his armor, a begrudging respect for humans, or at least good humans. One might even accuse him of caring about brave young Liesel, the book thief, who fiercely seeks knowledge and understanding in a time of agony and ignorance.

A-list actors should be lining up to read for the three central roles in Hitchers. The reason can be explained in one word: Oscar. Actors win Oscars for playing challenging roles, and all three of the starring roles in Hitchers require the actor to play dual parts: The character, and the dead person possessing the character. They’re challenging roles, for sure! Here are my casting choices:

Finn Darby. Colin Farrell gets the role of the tortured cartoonist, partly because he’s Irish. Playing Finn when he is controlled by his ranting, drunken, dead Irish grandfather will require someone who can put on a dynamite Irish brogue. Farrell also has the emotional range to play a tortured soul like Finn. It’s an introspective role -- the character’s face must always carry the weight of his responsibility for the deaths of both his wife and, as a boy, his twin sister. This role has Oscar written all over it.

Summer. The actor playing Summer has to be thin and slight, cute but not stunning. She has to be believable as a poor, struggling single mom working as a waitress. She also has to convince an audience that she is possessed by a voluptuous, flamboyant Latina woman. It’s a tall order. I’d like to cast Carey...[read on]

Monday, February 27, 2012

Challenging the idea that feminism in the United States is dead or in decline, Everywhere and Nowhere examines the contours of contemporary feminism. Through a nuanced investigation of three feminist communities, Jo Reger shows how contemporary feminists react to the local environment currently shaping their identities, tactics, discourse, and relations with other feminist generations. By moving the analysis to the community level, Reger illustrates how feminism is simultaneously absent from the national, popular culture--"nowhere"--and diffused into the foundations of American culture--"everywhere." Reger addresses some of the most debated topics concerning feminists in the twenty-first century. How do contemporary feminists think of the second-wave generation? Has contemporary feminism succeeded in addressing racism and classism, and created a more inclusive movement? How are contemporary feminists dealing with their legacy of gender, sex, and sexuality in a world of fluid identity and queer politics? The answers, she finds, vary by community.

Everywhere and Nowhere offers a clear, empirical analysis of the state of contemporary feminism while also revealing the fascinating and increasingly complex development of community-level feminist groups in the United States.

I usually read several things at once, predominantly reading more fiction than non-fiction and always making sure I have some reading that is purely guilty pleasure. I also sometimes am reading as a screenwriter and television writer, looking for works to adapt or at works that have been suggested for adaptation. Currently I have several books that I am working through at the same time, for different reasons.

The first is my guilty pleasure, Tom Knox’s The Lost Goddess, a thriller that explores archeology and alternative theories of our past. Having read Knox’s The Genesis Secret and The Marks of Cain, and having enjoyed them, I picked up The Lost Goddess so that I could once again look at our world through a different lens and be entertained by the action and thriller elements Knox weaves in so well.

For Sean Corrigan the past is simply what happened yesterday, until his twenty-first birthday, when he is given a journal left him by his father’s brother Michael—a man he had not known existed. The journal, kept after his uncle fled from New York City to Ireland to escape prosecution for a murder he did not commit, draws Sean into a hunt for the truth about Michael’s fate.

Sean too leaves New York for Ireland, where he is caught up in the lives of people who not only know all about Michael Corrigan but have a score to settle. As his connection to his uncle grows stronger, he realizes that within the tattered journal he carries lies the story of his own life—his past as well as his future—and the key to finding the one woman he is fated to love forever.

With the appeal of The Time Traveler’s Wife and the classic Time and Again, this novel is a romance cloaked in mystery and suspense that takes readers inside the rich heritage of Irish history and faith. Until the Next Time is a remarkable story about time and memory and the way ancient myths affect everything—from what we believe to who we love.

Hedwig, a snowy owl, is given to Harry Potter on his 11th birthday by Hagrid. The (female) owl delivers messages to our hero and provides solace while he lives with the Dursleys. Rowling became increasingly owl-devoted, and gave owl companions to Ron Weasley, Percy Weasley and Malfoy.

London, 1781. Harriet Westerman anxiously awaits news of her husband, a ship's captain who has been gravely injured in the king's naval battles with France. As London's streets seethe with rumor, a body is dragged from the murky waters of the Thames.

Having gained a measure of fame as amateur detectives for unraveling the mysteries of Thornleigh Hall, the indomitable Mrs. Westerman and her reclusive sidekick, anatomist Gabriel Crowther, are once again called on to investigate. In this intricate novel, Harriet and Gabriel will discover that this is no ordinary drowning-the victim is part of a plot to betray England's most precious secrets.

The critics raved about their first adventure, comparing them with the characters of Tess Gerritsen in period clothes. Fans of Instruments of Darkness will find the smart and spirited pair's second outing just as riveting.

When we think about trust, we naturally think about personal relationships or bank vaults. That's too narrow. Trust is much broader, and much more important. Nothing in society works without trust. It's the foundation of communities, commerce, democracy—everything.

In this insightful and entertaining book, Schneier weaves together ideas from across the social and biological sciences to explain how society induces trust. He shows how trust works and fails in social settings, communities, organizations, countries, and the world.

In today's hyper-connected society, understanding the mechanisms of trust is as important as understanding electricity was a century ago. Issues of trust and security are critical to solving problems as diverse as corporate responsibility, global warming, and our moribund political system. After reading Liars and Outliers, you'll think about social problems, large and small, differently.

Tired of trying to muster sympathy for passive Nazi accomplices, I was pleased to encounter the dark excitement of Dan Vyleta's "The Quiet Twin" (Bloomsbury, 374 pages, $16). The novel is set in and around a Vienna apartment complex where, shortly after the outbreak of the war, Nazis are turning up murdered.

When the Gestapo begins investigating the deaths, the Germans force an unassuming doctor, Anton Beer, to help them. Dr. Beer, who lives in the apartment complex, was a forensic psychologist before such research was banned by the Nazis because it "violated the precepts of National Socialist science." As in Hitchcock's "Rear Window," paranoia mounts as a rogues' gallery of the doctor's neighbors are introduced, each of whom may be a killer or a Nazi informer.

Amid this rich noir atmosphere, a deeper conflict emerges when Dr. Beer becomes the caretaker for a quadriplegic woman and a traumatized orphan. "The Quiet Twin" then plays out the battle between the Nazis' urge to eliminate society's most vulnerable members and the humanist doctor's duty to protect them. That the battle is unequal from the start does not detract from this tense, well-wrought novel.

English professors like to teach texts that we are “working on,” and since I am now writing a book about satire aimed at the college student and the common reader, much of what I am working on these days is satiric. Prepping a graduate seminar in American fiction last fall allowed me to discover some great American satires I’d never read before, and to reopen and reevaluate some old favorites. Let me talk about two.

The book that surprised me most in re-reading was Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. I recalled almost nothing of my earlier encounters with Lewis, and I must have dismissed him as an artless social realist who lacked the stylistic daring of his great high-modernist contemporaries. It’s true that the satire in Babbitt can feel polemical and obvious, and for intellectuals today a Midwestern Republican businessman is perhaps too easy a target. But although the plodding Babbitt (like his literary descendant Rabbit) often seems overmatched by the intelligence of his creator, this remarkable novel still manages to...[read on]

In this groundbreaking study, Jonathan Greenberg locates a satiric sensibility at the heart of the modern. By promoting an antisentimental education, modernism denied the authority of emotion to guarantee moral and literary value. Instead, it fostered sophisticated, detached and apparently cruel attitudes toward pain and suffering. This sensibility challenged the novel's humanistic tradition, set ethics and aesthetics into conflict and fundamentally altered the ways that we know and feel. Through lively and original readings of works by Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and others, this book analyzes a body of literature – late modernist satire – that can appear by turns aloof, sadistic, hilarious, ironic and poignant, but which continually questions inherited modes of feeling. By recognizing the centrality of satire to modernist aesthetics, Greenberg offers not only a new chapter in the history of satire but a persuasive new idea of what made modernism modern.

If they make Contents May Have Shifted into a film, I would want Sandra Bullock to play the Pam character. I say this party because I know her production company was seriously considering buying my last book, Sight Hound for a while (they eventually passed) but during that time I did a little research and found out we feel the same way about animals in general and dogs in particular, about several works of literature and other things, (the questionable taste in men on both our parts hardly needs to be spoken of.) But beyond the practicalities of that I see a lot of myself in her, in her authenticity, her humor, and maybe most of all what I would call her “try.”

Why do some music styles gain mass popularity while others thrive in small niches? Banding Together explores this question and reveals the attributes that together explain the growth of twentieth-century American popular music. Drawing on a vast array of examples from sixty musical styles--ranging from rap and bluegrass to death metal and South Texas polka, and including several created outside the United States--Jennifer Lena uncovers the shared grammar that allows us to understand the cultural language and evolution of popular music.

What are the common economic, organizational, ideological, and aesthetic traits among contemporary genres? Do genres follow patterns in their development? Lena discovers four dominant forms--Avant-garde, Scene-based, Industry-based, and Traditionalist--and two dominant trajectories that describe how American pop music genres develop. Outside the United States there exists a fifth form: the Government-purposed genre, which she examines in the music of China, Serbia, Nigeria, and Chile. Offering a rare analysis of how music communities operate, she looks at the shared obstacles and opportunities creative people face and reveals the ways in which people collaborate around ideas, artworks, individuals, and organizations that support their work.

Jennifer C. Lena is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Barnard College in New York. A classical music composition that Lena helped to commission (“Hilos” by Alias Chamber Music Ensemble and Gabriela Lena Frank) was nominated for a 2012 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance.

Lust isn't, strictly speaking, a bad habit, but it is one of the so-called seven deadly sins. A few years ago Oxford University Press and the New York Public Library published a series of short books, each devoted to one of the sins. Simon Blackburn's on lust is my favorite. He admits at the outset that as a middle-aged man, a philosopher and a Brit to boot, his qualifications to write on this topic could be questioned. But he does an admirable job, bringing clarity and wit to his discussion of a charged subject. "Broadminded though we take ourselves to be, lust gets a bad press," he writes. "It is the fly in the ointment, the black sheep of the family, the ill-bred, trashy cousin of love and friendship." I particularly like the way he punctures both the moral distrust of lust that came to dominate Christian thinking and the overreaching generalizations about sexual desire propounded by thinkers like Freud and Sartre. The essay is spiced with apt quotations from poets who for some reason seem to offer more perceptive insights into the nature of lust than do theologians and philosophers.

It’s rare for me to reread a book, but that’s what I’m doing right now with Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. I read it a few years ago, but then my book club chose it this month, so I’m enjoying it a second time. I have never come across another novel like this – it’s so laugh-out-loud funny and quirky, and yet doesn’t fall into that trap of being cynical or mean-spirited. It is somehow very genuine and tender. I never imagined I would so love a book that’s basically about...[read on]

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees.

This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

In 1945, Elsie Schmidt is a naive teenager, as eager for her first sip of champagne as she is for her first kiss. She and her family have been protected from the worst of the terror and desperation overtaking her country by a high-ranking Nazi who wishes to marry her. So when an escaped Jewish boy arrives on Elsie’s doorstep in the dead of night on Christmas Eve, Elsie understands that opening the door would put all she loves in danger.

Sixty years later, in El Paso, Texas, Reba Adams is trying to file a feel-good Christmas piece for the local magazine. Reba is perpetually on the run from memories of a turbulent childhood, but she’s been in El Paso long enough to get a full-time job and a fiancé, Riki Chavez. Riki, an agent with the U.S. Border Patrol, finds comfort in strict rules and regulations, whereas Reba feels that lines are often blurred.

Reba’s latest assignment has brought her to the shop of an elderly baker across town. The interview should take a few hours at most, but the owner of Elsie’s German Bakery is no easy subject. Reba finds herself returning to the bakery again and again, anxious to find the heart of the story. For Elsie, Reba’s questions are a stinging reminder of darker times: her life in Germany during that last bleak year of WWII. And as Elsie, Reba, and Riki’s lives become more intertwined, all are forced to confront the uncomfortable truths of the past and seek out the courage to forgive.

The Underground Church proposes that the faithful recapture the spirit of the early church with its emphasis on what Christians do rather than what they believe. Prominent progressive writer, speaker, and minister Robin Meyers proposes that the best way to recapture the spirit of the early Christian church is to recognize that Jesus-following was and must be again subversive in the best sense of the word because the gospel taken seriously turns the world upside down.

No matter how the church may organize itself or worship, the defining characteristic of church of the future will be its Jesus-inspired countercultural witness.

Debunks commonly held beliefs about the early church and offers a vision for the future rooted in the past

Proposes that the church of the future must leave doctrinal tribalism behind and seek a unity of mission instead

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu said,"Robin Meyers has spoken truth to power, and the church he loves will never be the same."

Meyers is a nationally known United Church of Christ minister and peace activist. His congregation describes itself as unapologetically Christian and unapologetically liberal. He writes for Christian Century, is an award-winning commentator for NPR, and a professor of rhetoric in the philosophy department at Oklahoma City University.

Sam Bourne is a literary pseudonym for Jonathan Freedland, an award-winning journalist and broadcaster. He writes a weekly column in the Guardian, as well as a monthly piece for the Jewish Chronicle. He also presents BBC Radio 4's contemporary history series, The Long View.

Your next book, The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, is about a professional killer hired to kill Charles De Gaulle.

Again, the reader knows that Charles De Gaulle was not assassinated and therefore this book in a way should have no suspense, but instead it is full of suspense. I wanted to tip a hat to that. It is a book that excellently understood the importance of detail and process. Plenty of Frederick Forsyth imitators thought that is all you had to do, but actually you have to do a whole lot more. It is hugely important to get right the mechanics of how characters do things, and that can be enormously absorbing.

The famous example from The Day of the Jackal is how the central character, the Jackal, creates a fake identity and gets a fake passport. Frederick Forsyth had discovered that there really was a loophole, where as long as you produced a birth certificate of someone who had died – which in those days was pretty easy to do – then you could pretend to be that person and get a passport.

I have read somewhere that the loophole was cleared up as a result of the novel. And that is what makes the book compelling – you are observing the mechanics of an assassin who is a really blank character. He is unnamed, apart from being called “the Jackal”. He should be very blank, but it works because you buy into the idea of a traceless, faceless, ruthless killer.

And that all adds to the suspense, because your imagination can really get to work on what he might be like.

That’s right. It is so interesting how rules can be broken, because you would think that a character with no personality would be unengaging but actually it works very well. As you say, we can begin to speculate about what made this man like this. But there is also the procedural tension about how he will get from point A to B to C to D. It is one of those books that completely grips you.

You really want to know what's on my bedside table? Really? Well, I'll tell you. I got burnt out. I've read and read -- for reviews, blurbs, my grad students. The work was good -- sometimes really, really damn good. But everything was assigned. Everything had a due date. And, yes, I'll admit it. There was that keeping up with the Jones reading that I've always balked at. When everyone's reading The Help, I just simply refuse. I want to read what no one else is reading. So, in the past few months, that has included an ancient medical journal, an Old English Dictionary. I just rebel and then you can't make me read what everyone else is reading. Is this hard for me sometimes socially in literary circles (I still haven't gotten to Freedom.)? Well, yes, yes it is. But I'm already weird socially around other writers so forget it. And, I'll admit it, at this moment, a lot of people are reading The Orphan Master's Son -- it's on my bedside table and I'm loving it. And I haven't yet gotten my hands on Stewart O'Nan's latest and I feel a little ached about it. So I do read what others are reading, of course sometimes ... And I lose books. Did I mention this? For example, I just got my second copy of The Snow Child. I carry...[read on]

We know you are here, our brothers and sisters . . .
Pressia barely remembers the Detonations or much about life during the Before. In her sleeping cabinet behind the rubble of an old barbershop where she lives with her grandfather, she thinks about what is lost-how the world went from amusement parks, movie theaters, birthday parties, fathers and mothers . . . to ash and dust, scars, permanent burns, and fused, damaged bodies. And now, at an age when everyone is required to turn themselves over to the militia to either be trained as a soldier or, if they are too damaged and weak, to be used as live targets, Pressia can no longer pretend to be small. Pressia is on the run.

Burn a Pure and Breathe the Ash . . .
There are those who escaped the apocalypse unmarked. Pures. They are tucked safely inside the Dome that protects their healthy, superior bodies. Yet Partridge, whose father is one of the most influential men in the Dome, feels isolated and lonely. Different. He thinks about loss-maybe just because his family is broken; his father is emotionally distant; his brother killed himself; and his mother never made it inside their shelter. Or maybe it's his claustrophobia: his feeling that this Dome has become a swaddling of intensely rigid order. So when a slipped phrase suggests his mother might still be alive, Partridge risks his life to leave the Dome to find her.

Until the Next Time is actually comprised of two intertwined stories – that of Michael Corrigan, who is fleeing a murder charge in the United States and gets caught up in the ‘Troubles’ in Ireland in 1972 – and that of Sean Corrigan, his nephew, who goes back to Ireland twenty-five years later to solve the mystery surrounding his uncle’s death. Both men fall in love in Ireland, and both are at odds with the ‘Hard Men’ of the Provisional IRA.

Michael, who was a New York City Police Officer before fleeing The States, is a bit more worldly than Sean, but gets in over his head in Ireland and has an accessible vulnerability. There is no actor who I think would be more adept at playing Michael than Matt Damon, given the nuances of the role.

Sean is a bit more naïve, a modern-day Holden Caulfield, fumbling his way through life, likeable but frustrating in his lack of understanding of the world. Logan...[read on]

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Is religious freedom being curtailed in pursuit of equality, and the outlawing of discrimination? Is enough effort made to accommodate those motivated by a religious conscience? All rights matter but at times the right to put religious beliefs into practice increasingly takes second place in the law of different countries to the pursuit of other social priorities. The right to freedom of belief and to manifest belief is written into all human rights charters. In the United States religious freedom is sometimes seen as 'the first freedom'. Yet increasingly in many jurisdictions in Europe and North America, religious freedom can all too easily be 'trumped' by other rights.

Roger Trigg looks at the assumptions that lie behind the subordination of religious liberty to other social concerns, especially the pursuit of equality. He gives examples from different Western countries of a steady erosion of freedom of religion. The protection of freedom of worship is often seen as sufficient, and religious practices are separated from the beliefs which inspire them. So far from religion in general, and Christianity in particular, providing a foundation for our beliefs in human dignity and human rights, religion is all too often seen as threat and a source of conflict, to be controlled at all costs. The challenge is whether any freedom can preserved for long, if the basic human right to freedom of religious belief and practice is dismissed as of little account, with no attempt to provide any reasonable accommodation. Given the central role of religion in human life, unnecessary limitations on its expression are attacks on human freedom itself.

Paul Mason is the BBC's Newsnight economics editor. He is the author of Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global (2008), Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed (2010) and, this year, Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions. His first novel, Rare Earth, has also just been published in the UK.

This fictionalised memoir of a journey down the Yangtse River was acclaimed as a landmark in Chinese literature when he won the Nobel prize in 2000. It's a novel of introspection and loneliness. Gao's plays have been banned from performance after the authorities condemned his drama about the Tiananmen Square massacre as "a fabrication" on the grounds that he had not been there at the time.

When I was working on my book, I didn’t have much time to read fiction, so I have really indulged since I finished. I thought Amy Waldman’s book The Submission was wonderful. In her story, a committee holds a contest for a design for the 9/11 Memorial and the winner turns out to be a Muslim. Waldman, who was a reporter for The New York Times, uses her incredible reportorial skills and observational powers to bring this story to life. Having covered New York City politics, I can...[read on]

From the New York Times reporter whose beat is culture and ideas comes a fascinating, revelatory, and timely social history of the concept of middle age. For the first time ever, the middle-aged make up the biggest, richest, and most influential segment of the country, yet the history of middle age has remained largely untold. This important and immensely readable book finally fills the gap. In Our Prime is a biography of the idea of middle age from its invention in the late nineteenth century to its current place at the center of American society, where it shapes the way we view our families, our professional obligations, and our inner lives. Patricia Cohen ranges over the entire landscape of midlife, exploring how its biological, psychological, and social definitions have shifted from one generation to the next. Middle age has been a symbol both of decline and of power and wealth. Explaining why, Cohen takes readers from early-twentieth-century factories that refused to hire middle-aged men to twenty-first-century high-tech laboratories where researchers are currently conducting cutting-edge experiments on the middle-aged brain and body.

Heart-stopping prose and crackling observations on a spiritual journey toward a life rich in love and freedom.

Stuck in a dead-end relationship, this fearless narrator leaves her metaphorical baggage behind and finds a comfort zone in the air, “feeling safest with one plane ticket in her hand and another in her underwear drawer.” She flies around the world, finding reasons to love life in dozens of far-flung places from Alaska to Bhutan. Along the way she weathers unplanned losses of altitude, air pressure, and landing gear. With the help of a squad of loyal, funny, wise friends and massage therapists, she learns to sort truth from self-deception, self-involvement from self-possession.

At last, having found a new partner “who loves Don DeLillo and the NHL” and a daughter “who needs you to teach her to dive and to laugh at herself”—not to mention two dogs and two horses—“staying home becomes more of an option. Maybe.”

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

I have a long list of directors, but lately I’ve been leaning toward Quentin Tarantino, because he’s got such great taste in rock and roll. He could just write the screenplay if he wants to — he did the honors for Tony Scott’s True Romance, one of my all-time favorite movies. I think Tarantino could do justice to the twisted romance between Cass and Quinn that’s at the heart of Available Dark — this book is my version of Casablanca.

Hand, a New York Times notable author, has won the Shirley Jackson Award, the James Tiptree Award, the Nebula Award (twice), the World Fantasy Award (three times), and many others. Her novella, “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon,” was nominated for a Hugo Award.

The first full scale biography of Wallis Simpson to be written by a woman, exploring the mind of one of the most glamorous and reviled figures of the Twentieth Century, a character who played prominently in the blockbuster film The King’s Speech.

This is the story of the American divorcee notorious for allegedly seducing a British king off his throne. “That woman,” so called by Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, was born Bessie Wallis Warfield in 1896 in Baltimore. Neither beautiful nor brilliant, she endured an impoverished childhood, which fostered in her a burning desire to rise above her circumstances.

Acclaimed biographer Anne Sebba offers an eye-opening account of one of the most talked about women of her generation. It explores the obsessive nature of Simpson’s relationship with Prince Edward, the suggestion that she may have had a Disorder of Sexual Development, and new evidence showing she may never have wanted to marry Edward at all.

Since her death, Simpson has become a symbol of female empowerment as well as a style icon. But her psychology remains an enigma. Drawing from interviews and newly discovered letters, That Woman shines a light on this captivating and complex woman, an object of fascination that has only grown with the years.

I’m reading Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son. I’ve been close to the North Korean defector community in Seoul for many years, so have a natural interest in books all things Korean. I also appreciate the slightly off-kilter perspective that Adam brings, as well as the intensive research and courage it takes to...[read on]

An unflinching portrayal of the Korean immigrant experience from an extraordinary new talent in fiction.

Ranging from Korea to the United States, from the postwar era to contemporary times, Krys Lee's stunning fiction debut, Drifting House, illuminates a people torn between the traumas of their collective past and the indignities and sorrows of their present.

In the title story, children escaping famine in North Korea are forced to make unthinkable sacrifices to survive. The tales set in America reveal the immigrants' unmoored existence, playing out in cramped apartments and Koreatown strip malls. A makeshift family is fractured when a shaman from the old country moves in next door. An abandoned wife enters into a fake marriage in order to find her kidnapped daughter.

In the tradition of Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker and Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, Drifting House is an unforgettable work by a gifted new writer.

Carrie Fisher dispensed with the semi-autobiographical fiction of Postcards from the Edge and embraced the personal memoir whole-heartedly in this candid account of a booze-soaked, drug-addled career. What was it like to grow up the daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, Hollywood royalty and terrible parents? How did it feel to hold a PEZ dispenser that resembled her head? And what did she do when she woke up next to a friend in bed one morning, only to realize he was dead? Fisher answers to the best of recollection in this book, based on her one-woman show of the same name.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

For Sean Corrigan the past is simply what happened yesterday, until his twenty-first birthday, when he is given a journal left him by his father’s brother Michael—a man he had not known existed. The journal, kept after his uncle fled from New York City to Ireland to escape prosecution for a murder he did not commit, draws Sean into a hunt for the truth about Michael’s fate.

Sean too leaves New York for Ireland, where he is caught up in the lives of people who not only know all about Michael Corrigan but have a score to settle. As his connection to his uncle grows stronger, he realizes that within the tattered journal he carries lies the story of his own life—his past as well as his future—and the key to finding the one woman he is fated to love forever.

With the appeal of The Time Traveler’s Wife and the classic Time and Again, this novel is a romance cloaked in mystery and suspense that takes readers inside the rich heritage of Irish history and faith. Until the Next Time is a remarkable story about time and memory and the way ancient myths affect everything—from what we believe to who we love.

Breaking down walls between genres that are usually discussed separately—classical, jazz, and popular—this highly engaging book offers a compelling new integrated view of twentieth-century music. Placing Duke Ellington (1899–1974) at the center of the story, David Schiff explores music written during the composer’s lifetime in terms of broad ideas such as rhythm, melody, and harmony. He shows how composers and performers across genres shared the common pursuit of representing the rapidly changing conditions of modern life. The Ellington Century demonstrates how Duke Ellington’s music is as vital to musical modernism as anything by Stravinsky, more influential than anything by Schoenberg, and has had a lasting impact on jazz and pop that reaches from Gershwin to contemporary R&B.

Schiff is R.P. Wollenberg Professor of Music at Reed College. He is a composer, journalist whose articles have appeared in publications including the New York Times and the Atlantic, and the author of George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue and The Music of Elliot Carter.

Nevada Barr is an award-winning novelist and New York Times best-selling author. She has a growing number of Anna Pigeon mysteries to her credit--the latest, The Rope, is set in the Glen Canyon National Recreational Area--as well as numerous other books, short stories, and articles.

In growing up, too many of us leave behind our love of the drama, fantasy, romance, and mystery that we devoured as kids. Gaiman gives all that back to us. For that I adore him. This tale of a boy orphaned by murderers and raised by graveyard ghosts is magic.

I tend toward older classics from the 1910s through 1960s, but lately I’ve been catching a more contemporary—and metaphysical—vibe. The two novels fighting for prime position on my nightstand are The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer and The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta.

Both Wolitzer and Perrotta are great at skewering middle-class suburbia, while still granting us the humane pleasure of getting to know sympathetic, complex characters. I bought these books together as a birthday present to myself, thinking the authors shared some stylistic elements, without realizing that...[read on]

About the book, from the publisher:

Ernst Vogler is twenty-four years old in 1938, an employee of the Third Reich's Sonderprojekt, which is carrying out the Führer's designs to collect the great art of Europe. A country on the eve of inevitable war, Germany is an unhappy place for artistic, apolitical Vogler, especially when his mentor disappears without explanation. Before he can learn the reason, Vogler is given an assignment: travel to Italy and collect a famous Classical Roman statue, the Discus Thrower, and get it to the German border, where it will be turned over to Gestapo custody. It is a simple, three-day job.

Things start to go wrong almost immediately. The Italian twin brothers who have been hired to escort Vogler to the border seem to have priorities besides the task at hand - wild romances, perhaps even criminal activities on the side - and Vogler quickly loses control of the assignment. The twins set off on a dangerous detour and Vogler realizes he will be lucky to escape this venture with his life, let alone his job. With nothing left to lose, the young German gives himself over to the Italian adventure, and to the surprising love and losses along the way.

Romano-Lax worked as a freelance journalist and travel writer before turning to fiction. Her first novel, The Spanish Bow, was translated into eleven languages and was chosen as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, BookSense pick, and one of Library Journal’s Best Books of the Year.